French Marxism And Young Cambodians Were A Deadly Mix

June 27, 1997|By Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate.

WASHINGTON — As I read about the "capture" of Pol Pot this week, I thought back to one day in 1969 in Cambodia when I had presented Prince Norodom Sihanouk with a question that turned out to be far more important than any of us knew at the time.

"What are you going to do about the Cambodian students going to France?" I asked the Cambodian leader, who had employed every ancient and modern Khmer ruse possible to keep the Vietnam War out of his beautiful land.

The quintessentially voluble Sihanouk looked very serious for a moment. Then he spoke slowly. "They are learning a strange kind of French Marxism, which they are mixing with our ancient Khmer mysticism," he said. A pause. "I have now forbidden our young people from going to France to study."

Still another pause. Then he looked me straight in the face, with a sad look that is etched in my memory, and added, "But it may be too late."

It was too late. The toxic Soviet European Marxist genie had been let out of the bottle to poison what had been a peaceful and prosperous Southeast Asian land. All the beautiful traditions of Cambodia's national life soon gave way to the horrors committed by those students who went to France.

Assigned then in Saigon as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, I often went over to Phnom Penh--for relaxation. Compared to war-torn Vietnam, Cambodia was a divine place, with lovely hotels and restaurants you liked to linger at. In those years I drove virtually all over Cambodia and I saw hardly any poverty. It was a land of large wooden farmhouses set on stilts above the fields, of legendary Khmer temples and of graceful small cities.

Then, in 1975, came the Khmer Rouge.

Under Pol Pot's coldly fanatical, French Marxist-trained eye, his guerrillas mercilessly drove masses of Cambodians out of the cities. In that once-prosperous countryside I had known, upward of 1 million Cambodians were savagely put to death on ideologically correct collective farms. Officials, intellectuals, even people who merely wore glasses, were killed, usually by blows of hoes to the back of their head.

In Phnom Penh at the now infamous Tuol Sleng "processing center," at least 20,000 "enemies of the regime" were meticulously tortured and killed--but only after they were driven to the "confessions" that Pol Pot so loved and pored over.

It was the fanatical secrecy that revealed the inner truths of this bizarre movement. Pol Pot, who as the boy Saloth Sar studied carpentry before going on a scholarship to study electronics in Paris, did not even reveal that he was the leader of the Khmer Rouge before giving a five-hour speech in 1977. Once in power, the leaders were a mysterious and unknown group, under Pol Pot, called "Anka" or "the center."

But it was not until later that we recognized the symptoms there. The year 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, was "Zero Hour" when the world would be made anew (to them, nothing existed before that). In such spirit, the guerrillas gladly threw off their old names and took the letters of the Khmer alphabet as their new names. Anonymous savagery, "purified" by the confused fanaticism that Pol Pot found in the communist student organizations in France, allows for actions that names, known by the community of man, do not.

There is a surfeit of guilt to go around for the destruction of that lovely little country. If the French colonialists had left Vietnam earlier and not held on to their overseas empire, the whole area could have had moderate leaders. If the United States had not gotten into Vietnam, and then not invaded Cambodia, Pol Pot would never have found the colonial excuse and the support for his movement. If, if, if . . .

But it should also not be forgotten that this extreme savagery would never have happened at all without the Soviets and their Comintern, the ideological arm of Moscow that organized and financed these Marxist guerrilla movements across the world. As Sihanouk so correctly saw, it was essentially their fuzzy Marxism, taught to resentful young Cambodians, that made the Khmer Rouge so murderous. And the fact that they learned it on scholarship in the hated colonial country, France, made it all the more delicious: The colonial country in the end was teaching them how to ultimately defeat it.

With all of this historical baggage, I suppose it is "edifying" to know that apparently Pol Pot has been captured. It would be "gratifying" to see him put on trial for genocide, either in Cambodia or the West. But the hour is late for that.

Perhaps the best thing would be for us to recognize that the Cold War may be over for us, but it is far from over for the Cambodians and the Burmese, or for the Angolans and the Mozambiquans. They can tell you about colonialism and then about the Zero Hours that Marxism utopianism inevitably brings. They are still living it.